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This article examines the development of the Roman manipular legion, deployed from roughly 350-100 BC. Given the unreliability of literary sources for the Roman army prior to Polybius, the article backward engineers the manipular legion from its well-attested form in the Middle Republic, making use of reliable contemporary Hellenic comparanda preserved in Xenophon. These suggest that the manipular legion arose out of various expedients reacting to enemies with missile weapons and adapting to operations in rough terrain. One response was the deployment of a heavy infantry formation in successive waves based on age classes, eventually producing the triplex acies. The second was to divide the formation into columns, which eventually became the staggered columns of the legion's checkerboard formation. In contrast to recent reassessments that have argued the legion was the product of unique social and cultural forces in Archaic Italy, this paper reasserts a qualified version of the traditional view that the legion should be viewed as an articulated phalanx.1
Keywords: Maniple - triplex acies - Legion - Phalanx - Army - Early Republic.
The Roman Way ofWar
During the Republican period, the Roman army proved the institutional engine behind expansion across the Mediterranean. Infantry represented the preponderance of Roman land power, and Roman infantry tactics were unique by the standards of Hellenistic military practice, cited by the historian Polybius as one factor driving Rome's stunning imperial trajectory.2 Rather than deploy in large massed formations (i. e. a phalanx), Roman legions and their Italian wings deployed in a modular array of 120-160 man maniples (manipuli) arranged in three lines (triplex acies). The maniples maintained a modest spacing between each other (perhaps 10-20 meters, but no larger than the frontage of a maniple) and formed a checkerboard formation of units and gaps on the battlefield, sometimes dubbed a quincunx (after the dots on a five-die) by modern historians (See Fig. 1).3
This article probes the origins of this idiosyncratic tactic form. Such a project faces a seemingly insurmountable hurdle, in that the sources for the history of the early Roman army (and early Rome in general) are abysmal.4 No native tradition of narrative history existed until the late third century вс, and foggy memories of the Regal and Early Republican periods were patched together...